As I’ve written about before, both here and in articles with Tony Yang, there are many different ways to structure childhood vaccination laws. While much of the attention goes to whether or not states offer parents the right to exempt their children based on religious and/or philosophical grounds — see, for example, the recent American Academy of Pediatrics report supporting mandated vaccination for school and daycare attendance — there are many other implementation-related details in the laws that can increase or decrease the law’s efficacy at maintaining high vaccination coverage rates. For example, some states may require that exemption requests be filed annually (increases efficacy), some states require only that a form be correctly completed (decreases efficacy), some states allow for historically anti-vax practitioners, such as naturopaths, to complete medical exemption forms (decreases efficacy, and creates a new, permanent loophole for gaining exemptions), some states require that medical exemptions be reviewed and approved by a state public health officer (increases efficacy). Read More

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This week, the Supreme Court appropriately declined to hear an appeal of a 2nd Circuit decision upholding the right of the state to require vaccination as a condition of enrollment in public schools, and to exclude exempted children from attending school during an infectious disease outbreak.

Under the Constitution, states have police power to protect the public’s health, welfare, and safety. A long-standing use of this authority is to protect communities from risks related to vaccine-preventable illnesses. In addition, when an infectious-disease outbreak occurs, states may use their police power to interrupt further transmission of the disease by restricting the movement of individuals. All states have incorporated this concept of social distancing into their school immunization laws. Schools can prohibit an unvaccinated child, who is more susceptible to acquiring highly infectious vaccine-preventable illness and more likely to become a carrier and vector for it, from coming to school until the danger subsides. Such measures, coupled with ready availability of vaccines, reduce the potential spread of serious disease in a vulnerable and tightly packed community. Read More

Mississippi, dead last in the nation’s overall health rankings in 2012, 2013, and 2014, leads the nation in childhood vaccination rates, and hasn’t had a measles outbreak in more than two decades.

How did this happen?

Mississippi’s state childhood immunization law does not offer exemptions for religious or personal beliefs, and its medical exemptions may only be issued by pediatricians, family physicians, or internists.

Why doesn’t Mississippi have a religious or a personal belief exemption?

Earlier this week, the World Health Organization, responding both to the international outcry over the rapidly rising number of Ebola cases and deaths across sub-Saharan Africa (and critiques of the speed of their action), and the news that western health care workers and ministry had found ways to get access to the untested-in-humans Ebola drug ZMapp, convened a panel of ethicists to offer recommendations on more widespread use of experimental Ebola treatments.

1) Whether it is ethical to use unregistered interventions with unknown adverse effects for possible treatment or prophylaxis. If it is, what criteria and conditions need to be satisfied before they can be used?

2) If it is ethical to use these unregistered interventions in the circumstances mentioned above, then what criteria should guide the choice of the intervention and who should receive priority for treatment or prevention?

Silverman is Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI, and holds a secondary appointment as Professor of Public Health Law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. His research interests include legal, ethical and policy issues in public health and medicine, mobile health law and policy, interdisciplinary curriculum development, professional school admissions, medical humanities, human rights, and patient safety. He serves numerous leadership positions in the field of public health law, including as a mentor in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Georgia State University Future of Public Health Law Education: Faculty Fellowship Program, as a member of the American Public Health Association Action Board, and as past chair of the American Public Health Association Law Section. From 1998-2013, he was faculty at Southern Illinois University Schools of Medicine and Law, where he last held the positions of Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Professor of Psychiatry at SIU School of Medicine, and Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at SIU School of Law. While in Springfield, Illinois, he served as an appointed Commissioner to the Springfield Disabilities Commission, a board member of the Springfield School District Foundation, and as a member of the Memorial Medical Center Human Values and Ethics Committee.

Fairbanks School of Public Health and McKinney School of Law, Indiana University, Indianapolis.

This has been a big year for outbreaks of Vaccine-Preventable Illnesses (VPIs) in the United States. While we are only halfway through 2014, there have been more measles cases this year than we have seen since before 2000, when the Federal government officially declared the United States “measles free” (in other words: there are no more domestically-generated measles cases; all of our outbreaks are imported). We’ve also seen large mumps and whooping cough outbreaks. You can follow all the disease outbreak action, both here and worldwide, via the Council on Foreign Relations’ very cool interactive map.

States use their police power authority under the Constitution to try to minimize our risk of exposure to VPIs. First, every state requires that children demonstrate proof of immunization against many VPIs as a condition of entry into schools, preschools and day cares. States also permit exemptions to these laws – every state allows a child who may be medically susceptible to injury from vaccines to receive an exemption (with proper documentation of vulnerability), and most states allow parents to apply for an exemption based on either religious or broader philosophical grounds. A combination of factors, including: a nearly two decade trend of increasing numbers of families obtaining exemptions and clustering in particular communities (or avoiding vaccine requirements by taking advantage of law loopholes, such as if a state’s vaccine law does not cover private schools); waning effectiveness of vaccination protections over time (as has been seen with whooping cough); increased international travel facilitating ready reimportation of VPIs from abroad; and many more immunocompromised individuals living in our communities; have slightly weakened our overall protection against VPI outbreaks. Read More